Marketing Maestro: February 2009

Blogging is great. I love reading and writing posts but for the last few days (weeks) I was burned out or just too busy at work.  However I did find time to podcast with a couple of great Active Rain members.

Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Baltimore, MD to meet Margaret Rome in person.  Before I left she and I did a podcast on how to Build Your Real Estate Investing Power Team. If you don't follow Margaret's blog I recommend you check it out.

Yesterday Carolyn Tann-Starr flew (we all know her energy...) into my office and after having some fun we recorded a quick podcast on Real Estate Investing and Social Media.  If you don't know CTS then you are not a true Active Rain member.  She is always up to some interesting or fun adventure on her blog.

Enjoy the podcasts and let me/us know what you think.

PS - if you are in the NYC area and want to pop by for a podcast session just let me know.

Related Posts
Investing In Real Estate A Podcast

Earlier this month we put out a call for A few Good Bloggers (this was a members only post) interested in a guest column on the Trump Blog.  Well today the first of hopefully many columns by Tina Merritt was published on the Trump Blog. This is unique content from Tina that you won't find on any of her other blogs.  If you enjoy her work stop on by and check it out.

Give Tina a big congratulations.  She is now part of the Trump Blog team and we hope to help her grow her business as she helps provide interesting and educational content for our readers.

We have a few more bloggers working on their Trump posts and we hope to share those names as soon as we have their first posts live.

If you are interested in being part of the Trump Blog team take a look at our earlier post for some of the details and contact me via email.

The following quote was in a book I recently read. It is an excerpt from the Stanford University commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer. The message is a great reminder that you need to enjoy everyday as if it is your last.

"..."If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something....

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.... There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Now go out and enjoy your day.

Back in January Kerry Lucasse wrote a post titled FACEBOOK 2009 - Five easy ways to maximize your visibility & interact with others. I had been a member of Facebook for a while and was a fan of a few pages but had not set up a business page for Trump University.  I didn't see the ROI at the time.  After reading Kerry's post I realized it was time to set Trump U up with a fan page.  Read Kerry's posts and you will see step by step how easy this is to do.

So one weekend I took about 30 minutes and set up this page:

Trump University on Facebook Take a look and become a fan.  If you have any feedback or thoughts please share them with a comment. It is fascinating to watch the page grow with almost zero marketing.  It is also a fun way to interact with your clients, prospects and of course fans. In case you missed the memo... social media works!

Why become our fan?

Fans will be the first to know about special events, offers, opportunities to work with us and inside info we decide to "leak" etc.

This week I installed gotomypc.com on my office PC and it is amazing.  I am currently working from home but have full access to everything on my PC. 

Do you use a webmail client for your office email and hate it?
Did you ever want to access files on your office PC from home or forget to take home an important file?

If you answered yes, give GoToMyPC.com a try.  Your office PC becomes your computer no matter where you are in the world.  You can access and control documents and applications as if you were sitting in front of your PC.  Maybe I am a bit over excited by this (or sound like a commercial) and I am late to the game but I am loving life right now.

This link will give you a free 45 day trial (if you just go to the site it is 30 days free)
http://www.gotomypc.com/s/referral

Have fun and start loving life!

I just posted a rant about unsolicited sales calls to my blog at Trump University.  If you are in the mood for a good rant (with proposed solutions) check it out and let me know what you think.

The current slow down in our economy triggered the post.  If you are interested in other sales call related posts than you might find the following two posts interesting.  I wrote Voice Mail Marketing and Don't Ask a while back but are both still relevant today.

The other day I interviewed one of our real estate coaches.  The purpose of the interview was to create a podcast series to show the average 'Joe' (that would be me) how to get started investing in real estate.  We tried to have some fun with it and over time I will be pushing Stephen (the coach) on a variety of topics.  If you have a few minutes (the first interview was about 5 minutes) listen to the interview and let me know what you think.

In addition to getting more information on:

• Short Sales
• Foreclosures
• Auctions
• Using other people's money
• etc

What other topics should we cover?

BTW - If you want to be a guest on a future podcast let me know and we can try to work out a convenient time to record a session.

One of the first things I did after returning from vacation was check on Trump University's SEO standings.  We have people working on our natural search but you can't take anything for granted with Google... Two listings caught my attention that I had not seen on the first or second page results in the past.  They were both listings from Amazon for Trump University books.

Trump University Wealth Building 101

Trump University Entrepreneurship 101

In the past we ran marketing programs to promote these books but it has been months since any of them were active.  I guess there is a long tail on marketing efforts...  We don't make our money selling books but it is sure good to know that these pages are optimized for our brand name. I am going to do my best to make these pages more prominent in the search results.  At least these pages are relevant to our brand and are not negative.

Short lesson for today.  Check your brand in google regularly.  If you see results that are relevant for your brand great.  Do everything you can to push them up in the listings.  You never know when some less favorable listing will show up in the results. 

Not sure how to push up a listing and need help with SEO?  Let me know and I will do my best to help you out.

I take two weeks off for a family vacation and Bam! I get bumped from my #2 spot in the NYC area on Active Rain.  I guess I deserved it since I was so busy preparing for vacation and then catching up on my return I was off the network for almost a month.  Now I am back and ready to take back my spot and climb back up the Active Rain ladder.  So Morgan Evans watch out I am back and ready to go. A few more posts and some comments and you are going down to #3...  This is all in good natured fun of course but the Marketing Maestro is back.